The motto of the artist Pipilotti Rist tellingly characterizes contemporary
art in a Switzerland which is closely meshed with the rest of the world,
economically and otherwise: she positions herself in an international
context rather than a Swiss perspective. Andre Rogger takes a
look at the Swiss artists in the Deutsche Bank Collection.

At the 1992 World Expo in Seville, the Waadtland artist
Ben Vautier exhibited a painting in the Swiss Pavilion with a title
denying Switzerland's existence –
"La Suisse n'existe pas". This self-refutation made many expo
visitors shake their head in puzzlement. Even the painter's homeland was
rife with speculation as to the possible meaning of "Ben's" provocation,
and what this pavilion in Andalusia was actually supposed to represent,
if not Switzerland. Since then books of patriotic essays have appeared
claiming that Switzerland's innate being is actually confirmed by its
increasing cultural diversity, its four official languages and its
historic policy of decentralism, yet Ben Vautier's question as to the
content and character of "Swissness" is all too justified. The Swiss
federal state, founded in 1848, never regarded the promotion of culture
as a national responsibility. Switzerland, with its federalist
structure, never had a "Ministry of Culture" that provide state stimulus
and is open to political influences, something that is a fixture in the
state systems of France and Germany and smaller countries such as
Austria. The fostering of culture is seen primarily as the affair of the
separate regions, cantons, and, last but not least, private individuals.

That does not alter the fact, however, that there is plenty of art to be found
in Switzerland: no fewer than eleven cantonal academies of fine arts and
design ensure that the creativity of the country's seven million
inhabitants continues to flourish. But the political principle of
subsidiarity in the cultural sphere – that is, the delegation of
responsibility from the top down, from the federal state to the cantons
and thence to communities and private individuals – explains why artists
see their primarily affiliation with a certain region or a global art
network rather than regarding themselves as "Swiss" artists. This
heterogeneity is reflected by the extensive collection of Swiss art
displayed by the Deutsche Bank at its headquarters in Geneva, Lugano and
Zurich as well as in the main headquarters in Frankfurt. Rather than
pursuing a phantom of national uniqueness, the focus is on establishing
individual positions and seeking interconnections.

One of the very few leading figures of "Swiss art" who conveyed national
identity both at home and abroad was
Max Bill (1908 Winterthur - 1994 Berlin) – an artist who also takes a key
position in the collection of the Deutsche Bank. The sculptor and
graphic artist – active mainly in Zurich, though he also served as the
rector of the Ulm Academy of Design from 1951-56 – was assigned perhaps
the most prominent place in the Deutsche Bank's entire collection.
Situated on the public plaza in front of the twin towers of the
Frankfurter headquarters, Max Bill's granite monolith Kontinuität
(Continuity, 1982-86) greets Deutsche Bank employees and visitors alike. The
sculpture, 4.5 m high, is one of the last works by the "Grand Old Man"
of Swiss art, perfecting a motif Bill had explored since the early
thirties: artistic variations on the Möbius strip, named after the
German mathematician
August Möbius (1790-1868). This
Möbius strip, given one twist and joined seamlessly to produce the
baffling phenomenon of one continuous surface, had preoccupied Bill ever
since his apprenticeship at the Bauhaus in Dessau. In Frankfurt it
attains its ultimate concretion with a conceptually challenging double
twist to the infinite strip. As such the sculpture is the complex
summation of a mathematically inspired motif which Bill explored almost
obsessively, thus influencing a whole generation of Swiss artists.